Sales tax

Today I'm going to show how to use the sales tax feature for an invoice or bill in flowlog's billing feature set.

Enabling this feature makes what’s collected and owed in taxes transparent and easy to record w/ out having to do separate entries and unnecessary bookkeeping, because flowlog does it for you automatically. Being an automated process, it also makes it harder to make any mistakes that would be made when dealing with sales tax manually.

So if we look at how this works...

If or when you choose to apply sales tax to an invoice flowlog will create the necessary entry items for you and associate them with sales tax liability account that you created. And if you haven't done so then you will need to create a sales tax liability account in order to use the sales tax feature.

Additionally, when you view an entry associated with this account, you can see exactly what invoice and customer the sales tax is associated with. Which also happen to act as links in case you want to view the invoice or customer information.

If you decided to set a default sales tax percent in your set of books, then that percent will be automatically applied to every invoice (although it will not have any affect until you actually apply sales tax to a particular invoice or bill). You can also override the default sales tax rate for an invoice here. The rate you enter here is a decimal format.

You’ll need to choose your Sales Tax liability account so flowlog knows what account the sales tax entries are associated with.

I only have one sales tax liability account so I just call it sales tax. If I was selling products or services in multiple states then I might need to add additional sales tax liability accounts.

When you start adding invoice items you will begin to see that flowlog is already adding the appropriate amount of sales tax based on the rate you gave it above.

However if you change the tax amount manually down here under the subtotal, the sales tax rate above will not change. So just keep that in mind that if you want your tax amount to reflect the rate above, you will need to change the rate not the actual tax amount.

If you have multiple invoice items with different sales tax rates, you will need to create separate invoices for each set of invoice items with the same sales tax rate.

so that's how you might use the sales tax feature in flowlog. Thanks for watching!